We will probably have the first meeting on February 22nd – but make sure to check this site for updates. We will also let you know about the place. Below there’s a sketch of what we intend to do. Don’t worry if it sounds unfamiliar – the role of what follows is to give you some rough idea about the class, not to be a substitute for the class. Time allowing, we will do this for every class – a pre-class sketch or plan, and maybe some follow-up notes.
Every class will consist of two sessions, around 50 minutes each. For the first class, we will spend most of the first session discussing general issues: the topic, structure, and goals of the course, evaluation and grading, study materials etc. Our secret hope is to get over these things quickly and then spend some time on making sure we all have some pre-theoretic grasp of what concepts could be and why they matter.
We will see that, psychologically, what we aim at belongs to a theory of mental representation. Philosophically, it belongs to semantics, or the theory of meaning. These things are important as they stand, but one special way of capturing their role is to point out that they are foundational ingredients in a mature theory of communication. We’ll have to navigate between points of view and disciplines often – and maybe shifting perspectives will make things clearer.
In the second session we will approach a particular conception of how language works – Frege’s distinction between sense [Ger. Sinn] and reference [Ger. Bedeutung] – and, against the author’s anti-psychologism, we will consider the question if his theory of language can be extended into a theory of concepts.
There are no readings assigned for the first class, since we want you to believe we’re nice. Being nice however doesn’t stop us from recommending a quick glance at the following materials (feel free to be superficial – just skip what you can’t follow):
> section 1 from the SEP entry on Concepts
> Frege’s original paper [well, one of the En versions] ‘On Sense and Reference’
Once we’ll have the reader ready, there might be more. To be clear: none of this is mandatory, but redundancy, its reputation to the contrary, does not hurt. For the mandatory stuff, check the syllabus – we’ll also remind you here what’s next, since there might be minor changes as we proceed with the course.
